more about i can never leave the forest

album art for i can never leave the forest

for this album, i started with two design constraints: it had to be 170BPM, and it had to have dance-type drums (no hi hats!). i’d been listening to a lot of the helltaker OST and it has both of these things; i love that album but it’s so far from something i’d make that i wanted to push myself with these requirements and see where it took me. i thought i’d hate making dance-type beats after this, but it was a great direction to go in.

a second point of inspiration was that i’ve been re-listening to my thurible album a lot recently. i love those tracks but the drums on some of them are not what i want anymore. the same is true with that edelgard drip album. for this album, i’ve taken two songs from thurible and all five tracks from edelgard drip and remixed them at 170BPM with these all-new drums. they’re a lot more fun now. i like these versions much better.

for the actual music: i made and recorded three tracks on my nintendo switch korg package (morning glory, ruby bullet, & last swan). for the other tracks, i have two new originals (girasole & elysion) and the rest are remixed from thurible & edelgard drip. for these tracks, i recorded drum samples off of the korg synth package, and used them alongside the arturia analog lab synth package. i went out of my comfort zone by using more sequencers than i typically would in order to give tracks a more complex and dance-type feel. these sequencers added a lot of much-needed depth. for the up-tempo nature of a lot of these, i had to re-instrument a lot of, well, instruments, and i cut out a lot of reverb, delay, and other spacey effects.

for the album art, i ended up with just this trippy photo of a forest i took myself and then edited. i played around a lot with what i was going to do. i like how i’ve done my last several arts, which are just mashups of what i’m currently interested in as a hobby. i’ve been playing a lot of splatoon 3 recently in addition to guild wars, and dabbling in phantasy star as always of course. i tried using elements of these video games in my album art but i didn’t like them. i’ve been making it a point to meditate in nature recently, and that’s where i landed with the art. you can see some alternate arts here.

all of the track names are weapons from phantasy star online - i’ve been wishing to do this for awhile now and i’m glad i saved them for these tracks. the forest meditation i mentioned earlier is the origin of the “i can never leave the forest” album title. there’s a line in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (the game, not the short story) where nimdock - reliving his past and discovering his truth - says “the truth is, for me, it will always be the year 1945”. i discovered this game during my worst years from 2011-2013, and it even struck a note with me back then. ten years later i’m mostly healed but the truth is, for me, it will always be the year 2011. i can never leave the forest.